by God fire off some papers in the morning.

It had been a long day. The days got longer when Jimmy was working, felt that way anyway. This story was at that early stage where everything was incomplete, sketchy, self-contradictory—and he had done this enough to know that a big part of what he was “learning” was just simply wrong.

A seagull landed on a light stanchion. Jimmy turned around and looked toward Marina Del Rey, the immense condominiums which stood over the wide channels and the hundreds of slips. The tops of the tallest masts were visible between the towers.

The light was odd, noncommittal. He wished the sun would come up, right now.

An LAPD sergeant’s cruiser pulled in beside him. The cop was alone. The window was down.

“Saint Thomas,” Jimmy said.

The patrol cars all had computer monitors hung on the dash now and a full-size keyboard where you used to put your coffee. The radio spoke, the voice female and not very friendly. You could tell the cop was a sergeant by the extra antennas on the roof.

Saint Thomas’s last name was Connor. He got out. He looked to be in his fifties, handsome in that cops and firemen way, self-assured good looks, clear eyes, skin wrinkled not from worry but from being on the boat on the lake on days off, or on the sidelines coaching kids.

“You called?”

Jimmy nodded toward the Kinko’s and asked if Connor had known the DJ who’d turned into a cop. And then a dead cop. It wasn’t that Jimmy thought it had anything to do with the case, he was just curious. It was a good story, in that Movie of the Week way. Or maybe as a pilot for a cop show. Connor didn’t know much about Tone Espinosa except that he’d been killed. Cops all knew who’d been killed, almost all the way back to the beginnings of LAPD.

“Perversito,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Little Evil,” the cop said. “That’s who killed him, a gangbanger. He went away for it.”

Jimmy told him what he was working on, a version that left out almost everything but the murders and the execution and kids orphaned. Connor nodded.

They both looked at the nightclub-turned-Kinko’s.

“Disco sucks,” Jimmy said, but he was just quoting.

“I just remember getting laid a lot less for a year or so there,” Connor said.

“You couldn’t dance?”

“I guess not. Whatever it was, what I was didn’t work for a while there.”

Sergeant Connor gave Jimmy a name or two, people who knew about the club scene back then, the drugs, the money. The bar business was a cash business and tended to have bad people around its borders, but Big Daddy’s had been a safer, tamer, brighter version of the seventies club scene than some of the others.

Jimmy told him about the woman in the Rivo Alto house, asked the cop if he’d run a check on her, see if she had a history in the Naples neighborhood, in Long Beach. Maybe somebody had spotted her coming and going.

“You want her chased out?”

“No,” Jimmy said, and then wondered why he’d said it.

And that was it. A ground fog started to come in around them. It wasn’t cold but it looked cold.

Connor asked Jimmy how he was doing. Jimmy answered the question for real and asked the cop the same and listened to what he said. They both knew each other’s story. When the radio called the sergeant off to something somewhere out there in what was left of the night, the two men stood up and embraced and held the embrace for a long moment.

Where was that sun?

SEVEN

A Cessna landed. Badly. The right wheel touched first, the plane bucked, then the left wheel hit hard. On the grass between the runway and the taxiway, four old men sat in white plastic lawn chairs. They took a minute then held up handmade cardboard squares with numbers, grading the landing as if this was the Olympics. They had all been fliers or had built planes. It was all very unofficial but the understanding was that the old guys had earned the right to rag on the youngsters. Every pilot who landed tried not to look over but all of them did.

This time the scoring fell somewhere between a four and a five.

Jimmy walked up.

“You look like an undertaker,” one of the old men, Kirk, said. Jimmy wore a black suit.

He stuck out his hand.

“How are you?”

Angel had called Jimmy from his shop downtown at noon. He had come up with a